With the advent of the smart phone and accompanying application store such as the iPhone® and the AppStore® from Apple®, applications that can be downloaded from a remote store and used on a device are known and are used extensively. Generally, those applications are consumer focused applications which are light-weight and typically serve a single purpose. However, a system does not exist for the development, delivery and deployment of consumer-style action-oriented business applications that can be used to solve various types of business problems.
For example, the gasoline pricing for a supermarket chain is a business problem that could be solved by the desirable action-oriented business application. The business problem is that a major retailer with multiple stores sells gas but currently uses an Excel spreadsheet to set the selling price for the gas at each store. This spreadsheet takes in data feeds from a service that provides competitor pricing in the local area for each store and a feed from the nearest refinery to work out supply prices. The spreadsheet then uses some custom business logic to adjust the price to maximize the margin and communicates any price changes to both the ERP (which manages product prices) and the marketing team for changing the signage. The pricing team sometimes gets calls from a local retailer saying that the competitor has just changed its price, and requesting permission to also change the price. In the business problem, there are disparate data sources—some internal, some external, custom business logic to implement the analytics, actions require implementation through links to internal enterprise systems as well as other mechanisms such as email, and also that the solution needs to respond in real-time (or at least within minutes) to events within its environment. This business issue can be solved by action-oriented business applications.
Another example of a business problem is profit recovery through better supplier management in which a major retailer runs price promotions for various products all of which are funded by the supplier of that product. The retailer realizes that they have not been very diligent about invoicing suppliers for the costs of running these promotions and identifies that there is a potential of up to $20M that the retailer could recover from promotions run over the previous 6 years. To do this, the retailer needs to comb through sales and product data from their ERP, combine this with commercial discussions recorded only in an email archive, together with invoicing data stored as PDF's in a document repository. Once the analysis is completed, the retailer raises a claim for payment with the supplier. As with the other problems, this problem involves disparate data sources—ERP plus unstructured data, analytics that are used to identify suspect opportunities that then transition into a largely manual workflow—actions that require implementation through links to internal enterprise systems as well as other mechanisms such as email which can be solved by action-oriented business applications.
Another example of a business problem is reputation management in which a company wants to manage comments made about it in various online forums, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blog posts, etc, in order to be able to identify negative comments and respond. Identifying these comments needs some analysis of unstructured text, and could also identify trends in commentary (e.g. highlighting product problems, or problems in a specific geographic area). This would include monitoring comments from employees too, to check compliance with corporate communication policies. The actions taken might include commenting on the original posts, directing people to a central area (e.g. company website) where a response to the issue has already been identified, identifying that multiple comments are actually from the same person and calling that person up and proposing a way to fix the problem (turning a complainer into an evangelist). As with the other business problems, the problem involves disparate data sources—some internal, some external, but many of which are unstructured and quite non-traditional—custom business logic to identify issues and trends, actions that require implementation through links to internal enterprise systems as well as other mechanisms such as email, and workflow processes that consist of many manual elements before the issue can be closed. This business issue can be solved by action-oriented business applications.
Another business issue is decision support for financial trading in which a hedge fund wants to store trades and price changes of securities, together with external factors such as world events associated with a company's home base, commentary about it on social networks, breaking news regarding accidents etc. All of these factors are taken into account in recommending a trading position in that security, going through a workflow process to adjust and approve that trading strategy, and then executing the trades needed to achieve that position. As with the above business issues, this issue involves disparate data sources—some internal, some external, but many of which are unstructured and non-traditional, custom business logic to identify issues and trends, actions that require implementation through links to internal enterprise systems, and workflow process that consists of a defined process of approvals etc before the issue can be closed. This business issue can be solved by action-oriented business applications.
Another business problem is student management for colleges and universities in which students are enrolled in a college, but are not able to choose which courses they want to attend, and what their communication preferences are. Based on their selection, allocation of appropriately-sized lecture rooms can be automated, students can be issued with the set of pre-requisites for the course (e.g. reading materials), advised of any changes to the rooms, have timetable entries added to their calendars, be given reminders when their GPS location is not close to the designated room—or else given directions to get to the room from where they are. Communications can be delivered via email, SMS, or Tweet. This problem again involves disparate data sources—mostly internal, custom business logic to react to events (e.g. change of room), actions that typically require implementation through links to internal enterprise systems, and communication via preferred mechanism of each student. This business issue can be solved by action-oriented business applications.
Yet another business issue involves location-based services in which customers sign up for alerts about retail offers based on their location such that whenever they are passing a shop with an offer available, they get alerted with details. This issue involves disparate data sources—location-based for customer and store locations, some internal (i.e. the set of offers and promotions), custom business logic to identify which offers to make to which customers, actions that require implementation through links to internal enterprise systems to track take-up of offers vs recommendations made, the need to react to events in real-time and the need to handle high-volume throughput of location updates. This business issue can be solved by action-oriented business applications.
Yet another business issue involves travel information alerts in which a traveler wants to be alerted when a change in travel plans changes—a flight is delayed, or there is an accident on your normal route to the airport, or your commute route. This issue also involves disparate data sources—mostly external, but many of which are unstructured and non-traditional and custom business logic to identify issues. This business issue can be solved by action-oriented business applications.
Yet another business issue involves customer service improvement in which a customer service rep needs to have a 360-degree view of all of a customer's interactions with the company when the customer calls in, including actions taken on the company website a couple of minutes ago, promotions and offers the customer has taken up, emails that have been exchanged with the customer, etc. If there is a problem with the service in the area in which that customer is located, then pro-actively tell them this. Data is used to figure out how to solve the customer's problem, and then take actions such as cross-selling a new product, changing the calling plan that customer is on, offering to refund or defer some costs they may have incurred, etc. This issue also involves disparate data sources—mostly internal, but may be unstructured (e.g. text mining of emails), a hard to automate analysis of issues without talking to customer, but can flag up most relevant items to the customer service rep, actions that require implementation through links to internal enterprise systems and a workflow process that consists of a defined process (e.g. obtaining approvals of proposed actions from supervisor) before the issue can be closed. This business issue can be solved by action-oriented business applications.
Thus, there are many different business issues/problems that can be solved by action-oriented business applications. Some existing solutions attempt to solve the above business issues/problems, but none of the existing solutions fully solve the problems/issues.
Thus, it is desirable to provide a cloud action platform that delivers action oriented applications to business users that brings the same level of productivity and user satisfaction that exists in existing consumer applications, and it is to this end that the disclosure is directed.